14 DAY TRIAL // Elite: Dangerous is a game built by legendary David Braben and his team from Frontier Developments. It's inspired by the original Elite game, made by the same developer. Elite was launched in 1984, in a time when the PC computers were non-existent and the two machines which could have run the game were BBC Micro and Acorn Electron.
What could possibly these two games have in common, after so many years? This is a legitimate question and surprisingly enough, it's not even hard to answer.
Besides the developer, they both share the same idea, that space is vast and pirating will always be a way to earn fast money, at least in video games.
Most of all, Elite was the truly first open-world game. It had eight galaxies and each of them consisted of 256 star systems. Each planet in those systems had its own legal system, economy and so on.
Everything fitted in a 22 Kb game and most of game was done through procedural generation. Even better, in 1993, the developer launched Frontier, a game which had a model of the whole Milky Way galaxy with all 100,000,000,000 or so star systems, and many more planets and moons, each of which you could visit.
According to Frontier Developments, the new Elite is an amazing space epic with stunning visuals, incredible gameplay and breath-taking scope, but this time you can play with your friends too.
The heart of Elite: Dangerous will be a powerful Procedural Content engine that will cut the cost considerably, giving the developers more freedom to create content.
Most importantly, Frontier Developments reached out to the community through Kickstarter in order to avoid big publishers. This means that not only is a Linux version possible, but it's also taken in consideration.
“The PC version comes first, and then we will look at the demand for other platforms. If the game exceeds its target, then there will be scope to increase the number of platforms. We will discuss with the backers in the design discussion forum, and how to address the issues that will arise, but I have every hope that we will cover some or all of these platforms (Linux included),” states the Kickstarter announcement.
If you are interested in the project and you want to see Elite: Dangerous on Linux, visit the official Kickstarter website and back the project.